Friday, 21 December 2012

Many thanks to John Sayers for alerting me to the exhibition The Postcard Age at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which runs until April 14 2013. Although sadly I won't see the exhibition itself, there are screen shots of it online, and I am very much looking forward to reading the accompanying book The Postcard Age by Linda Klich and Benjamin Weiss, which we now have in the Bodleian Library.

The exhibition is a taster of the 100,000 postcards which Leonard A. Lauder (son of Estée) is gradually giving to the Museum. The cards are arranged by themes such as urban life, the changing role of women, sports, celebrity, new technologies, art nouveau and WWI.

There is an online slideshow of 10 cards from the exhibition and you can send a virtual postcard from the exhibition. I particularly like the moving images of the display (together with the other current exhibitions), which can be seen from the museum's home page. Postcards, by virtue of their size, present challenges for display and it is good to see how the museum has approached these.

Nearly 22,000 Japanese postcards from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection are already at the museum and can be seen online (most with images).

This is a serious postcard collection, acquired over many years and representing the height of the postcard craze from the 1900s to the beginning of the First World War. Leonard A. Lauder has collected the jewels of this age, internationally. It is a pleasure to see these cards given the status of a museum collection, with a dedicated exhibition, and elucidated in a scholarly volume.

Tuesday, 18 December 2012

Very many thanks to Anthony Tedeschi for his second post about Australasian ephemera and to Richard Overell of Monash University for supplying images from their collections. Anthony's own blog: Antipodean Footnotes gives fascinating insights into rare books and special collections in New Zealand and Australia.

For details on the various subject categories
collected, it is suggested interested readers consult each institution’s
on-line catalogue (subject search ‘ephemera’). A Directory of Australian Ephemera Collections was published by the
State Library of New South Wales in 1992. An Index, compiled by the State
Library of Victoria, was published the following year.

The AIATSIS began collecting ephemera in the 1970s.
Starting out with a focus on print material, the collection has grown to
include non-paper items, such as badges, t-shirts, and tea towels. The largest
sequence in the collection is comprised of invitations to openings of
Indigenous art exhibitions from across Australia.

A PDF summary of the collection and index to the ephemera
categories is available (see link above).

Monash University special collections have been
acquiring ephemera since the 1990s. Material in the collection dates from late
seventeenth-century English pamphlets and broadsides to current menus, games, souvenirs,
posters, flyers, cards, and junk mail. In 2011, the library hosted an
exhibition called Ephemera, with a catalogue
(PDF) and on-line
version providing an overview of its rich holdings.

The Monash collection featured on the John Johnson
Collection’s Ephemera Resources blog on 6
February 2012.

Australia’s national library has been collecting
ephemera relevant to the nation since the 1960s. The Australian ephemera is
indexed and divided into seven themes by subject: Australian performing arts
programmes and ephemera (PROMPT), formed collections, general ephemera,
geography and travel, programmes and invitations, scrapbooks, and trade
catalogues. While the NLA collects widely, it aims to acquire as much Federal
election campaign material and material relating to national events as
possible. In 2007, the NLA received the oldest example of Australian printing –
the 1796 ‘Jane
Shore playbill’ – as a gift from the Canadian government.

Between the Mitchell and State Reference libraries,
the SLNSW holds a diverse collection of ephemera, which includes some of the
earliest examples in Australia. Among the individual pieces highlighted on the
Library’s website are: a 1612 Dutch translation of the de Quiros pamphlet,
which contains the earliest printed reference to the word ‘Australia’, a
broadside ca. 1789 describing a wild man or monstrous plant brought from Botany
Bay, a playbill dated 8 March 1800, propaganda leaflets dropped by a Turkish
aeroplane at Gallipoli during World War I, and an album of invitations, menus
and other ephemeral printing related to the Inauguration of the Commonwealth of
Australia in 1901.

The John Oxley Library of the State Library of
Queensland notes calendars, elections, exhibitions and festivals, invitations,
menus, royalty and royal visits, sport, and trade programmes among the
categories of material which it collections. The strongest sequence in the
collection is the Library’s theatre programmes, which date from 1866 to the
present day.

The John Oxley Library blog uploaded two helpful posts (available
on the same page) describing its theatre ephemera and how to search the
ephemera collection in the Library catalogue.

Material in the State Library of South Australia’s
ephemera collection dates from 1836 onwards, and includes material similar in
nature to many other institutions, from badges and business cards, to greeting
cards and sheet music. The library, however, also holds a unique collection of
wine labels. Collected since 1972, there are approximately 10,000 labels in the
collection, reflecting the state’s connection to the Australian wine industry.
A description of the collection can be found on the ephemera guide page (see
link above), and two hundred and fifty labels have been digitised and are
available through the Library’s Wine Literature of the
World website.

Centred on ‘Victoria and Victorians’, but including
material from across the country as well, the State Library of Victoria holds
one of the largest ephemera collections in Australia. Material dates from the
1850s onwards. In addition to the types of ephemeral material held by other
institutions, the SLVA is busy building a collection of local zines to document
Melbourne’s thriving art and music scenes.

The SLWA ephemera collection numbers over 100,000
items. The library maintains a
selection of highlights from its ephemera collection on topics such as ships
and shipwrecks in Western Australia, royal visits, firms and businesses, the
Festival of Perth, and a collection of tombstone inscriptions gathered from
Western Australian cemeteries. There is also a page dedicated to finding Indigenous ephemera.

Part of the Sir George Grey Special Collections, the
ACL Ephemera Collection includes material from the 1840s onwards divided into
three distinct collections: the Old Colonists’ Museum Collection (material on
Auckland’s colonial period given to the library when the OCM closed in the
1950s), the Freida Dickens Programme Collection (music, dance and theatre
programmes, 1911-1976), and the New Zealand Ephemera Collection, which is
divided into two sequences based on type and subject matter respectively
(material includes menus, tickets, advertising flyers, cards and calendars).

It is always a pleasure to be able to cross-search collections, especially such rich ones. There are the usual search and advance search options and also browsable lists by title, author, date and type of material. A symbol indicates which section of the project the material is from (e.g the card symbol above for Spiritualism, sensation and magic). Although books, diaries, correspondence, journals, etc are included, the substance of the project is ephemera.

Thursday, 13 December 2012

The National Fairground Archive at the University Library, University of Sheffield, under the leadership of Professor Vanessa Toulmin, has holdings which document fairs, circuses, menageries, magic, optical shows, etc. A subject list gives the scope of the collection, which includes 4,500 books, 250 journals titles, moving images, photographs, drawings, audio material, correspondence, diaries, cuttings, account books, maps, charts, plans, teaching materials, notebooks etc, as well as ephemera: postcards, trade and advertising material, programmes, calendars, almanacs, posters, proclamations, and 20,000 posters and handbills. There are word processed indexes (currently under revision) to each of these genres.

Researchers can visit in person, without an appointment Monday to Wednesday, with an appointment on Thursday. Opening hours are posted online.

The National Fairground Archive has just launched NFA digital, with images added weekly. 19,720 images are currently online and these can be browsed or searched by collection, period, subject, place and name. The Search tips, especially the explanations of themes and subject terms, are very helpful.

You can follow the National Fairground item on Twitter: @professorvaness

The subscription site: Victorian Popular Culture (Adam Matthew) which will be covered more thoroughly in my next post, includes material from the National Fairground Archive

Thursday, 6 December 2012

The Circus Museum, NL is a superb site, with a wealth of imagery. There are both Dutch and English versions. The Foundation (housed at the Teyler Museum, Haarlem) contains the collection of Jaap Best augmented (during his lifetime) by the archives of the German acrobat and circus collector Erdwin Schirmer. This consisted largely of 3,500 chromolithographed posters of Adolph Friedländer.

Online are 8,000 posters, and 7,000 circus photographs and postcards. Reproductions can be bought for most of them but the zoomable images are ideal for research. Although predominantly Dutch and German, the collection is truly international, as the scroll-bar list of towns in advanced search reveals.

There is a very useful feature in Simple search: each of the main categories (Acrobatics, Animals, Clowns, Dance, Ethnographic shows, Fairgrounds, Folklore, Freaks, Jugglers, Musicians, Music and Theatre) can be further refined by its own subcategories through a second scroll-bar (e.g Acrobats, stilt-walkers).

A very effective site, which enables complex searches of its superb collections with the minimum of fuss.

Tuesday, 4 December 2012

HONG (Historisch Overzicht Nederlandse Gezelschapsspellen) is a historical survey of Dutch games, the website of Rob van Linden. It can be browsed by publisher, title, and themes (cars, planes, boats, trains, sports, Disney, music etc). There is also simple and advanced searching (Uitgrebrieder zoeken).

Each entry typically has several digital images, showing the packaging (where applicable), contents and sometimes details, but not (for later games at least) necessarily each separate card or element of the game. Many board games are commentated. There is a very useful table giving the chronology of games publishers and their relationship with each other.

Since I have to confess to an almost total ignorance both of Dutch games and language, I found date a rewarding way to search this impressive resource, it then becoming possible to make comparisions with British games. This is best done through the advanced screen. Entering 1700-1800 gave me 36 fascinating results. The major focus of the site is games dating from 1861-1999.

Krygs spel, 1710 Photo (C) Luigi Ciompi. The game is held
at the Openluchtmuseum

As in the case of the earliest game: the Krygs Spel (left), many images (of the Game of the goose and other games) come from the Gioci dell'Oca website and from the Fred Horn Goose games at the Flemish Games archive, KHBO University in Bruges (a collection of 25,000 games housed in the Faculty of Education and Teacher Training, with its main focus "the integration of board games in early childhood, primary and secondary teaching"). Others come from Dutch museums (notably the Speelgoedmuseum Deventer) and libraries, including the Reclame Arsenaal. Each game is also cross-referenced to variant titles (where applicable) and to relevant reference works.

ADVERTISING: THE RECLAME ARSENAAL

(C) Reclame Arsenaal nl. (Home page)

The Reclame Arsenaal is the result of a merger in 2001 of the Nederlands Reclameachief (Dutch Advertising Archive), founded in 1981, and the Nederlands Reclame Museum (Dutch Advertising Museum), founded in 1975.

Again, a command of Dutch would be a distinct advantage, but there is much to explore: a searchable database, virtual museum, online exhibitions, etc. The material is divided into Advertisements, Posters, Small printed works (leaflet, calendars, etc.) and Varia (works in other media such as textiles, enamel) and dates back to 1870. For purposes of the virtual tour, online museum, etc the works are divided into periods: 1870-1915, 1915-1930, 1930-1940, 1940-1945, 1945-1960, 1960-1975, 1975-1990, 1990-2002. A nice, quirky touch is a street image for each period, showing the Reclame Arsenaal material as if displayed on billboards, etc. Mousing over one of these items turns it into colour, while clicking brings up a pop-up box with caption and link to the main object description. Each period is accompanied by digest of Dutch history.

The searchable database offers simple and advanced searching. My simple search for Chocolade brought up 21 items, all with thumbnails which click through to records with larger images. Advanced searching enables the user to restrict results to type of object, collection (other collections, e.g. Decaux can be searched through this database) and date. There is Boolean searching. The collection includes games (a search for spel) yields 80 results.

There are also multimedia online exhibitions, for Persil and Packaging for example.

Both sites offer interesting ways to compare Dutch culture with our own, either chronologically, or through Dutch versions of familiar games or advertising of international products, as well as presenting Dutch popular culture in accessible and attractive ways.